1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a karaoke control system for controlling a plurality of karaoke devices to perform karaoke. Karaoke is a type of entertainment where users sing songs in time with accompaniment music while reading lyrics of the songs on a monitor screen. The lyrics are displayed on the monitor screen superimposed on background images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Music data for several thousand songs is required per commercial karaoke unit to meet requests of customers. Therefore many video disks storing music data by songs are required. These plurality of video disks are housed in a special housing case. A disk is selected and reproduced by an automatic changer (referred to as autochanger hereinafter) according to a request. The special housing case and the autochanger occupies a great amount of space. This space is inefficiently used from a business perspective and could be put to better use, such as to form an additional room in a karaoke establishment where rooms for singing karaoke in private are rented out. There has been a demand for more compact commercial karaoke units.
Many karaoke systems with centralized management have been provided in recent years to fill this need. One such centrally managed karaoke system has a plurality of terminals and a central control portion where video disks and auto-changers are situated. The central control portion receives a request signal transmitted from a terminal and transmits image data and music data that matches the request signal back to the terminal. However, in such a centrally managed karaoke system also, a large area is occupied in the central management room when the image data and music data is attempted to be located in the central management room. To solve this problem, U.S. Pat. No. 5,319,452 has proposed a control system for controlling music accompanying devices for saving space.
According to the control system for controlling music accompanying devices, music data and image data are stored separately. Sets of image data are stored categorized by the different genre of the music data. The central control portion continuously outputs the sets of image data. Each terminal selects the set of image data most appropriate for any particular selected music data. By storing the music data separated from the image data, the storage capacity for image data can be reduced. The size of the device and the space it takes up can also be reduced.
With the example described above, however, because one song is about four minutes long, image data sufficient for only 14 to 15 Japanese ballads and the same number of popular songs is provided on the one video disk, for example. Therefore, a person singing a great number of songs will possibly tire of seeing the same background image. Further, the displayed image corresponding to the first portion of the song leaves a particularly strong impression. Therefore, when only 14 to 15 image patterns are available for either Japanese ballads or popular songs, users of karaoke will possibly get the impression that the background images are always the same.
In a separate problem, when songs are thus divided into only two image genres (i.e., corresponding to Japanese ballads and popular songs), invariably some background images will be inappropriate for the content or gist of the song being sung. Although Japanese ballads can be handled with a comparatively small number of images, popular songs must include images for a great variety of song types including animation film songs, children's songs, folk songs, blues, rock and roll, movie theme songs, etc. Also, only 14 to 15 image patterns can not cope well with all situations, such as when a summer scene appears during a song about winter or when a tranquil scene appears during a up-tempo song.
This problem can be solved by dividing or classifying images finely into an increased number of image genres so as to prepare image data better matching the content of each song. In other words, the images can be divided into further image genre so as to better match the content of each song. However, if, for example, the songs are divided into about ten genre, more than a predetermined number of image patterns has to be provided for each genre, in order not to give users of karaoke a strong impression of the same images being repeatedly shown. This, however, leads to an increase in the total number of image data, which is contrary to the demand for more compact devices.
In another separate problem, video disks used in single-standing karaoke devices can not be used in the centrally controlled karaoke system described in the U.S. Pat. No. 5,319,452. Therefore, special video disks must be produced for this system, which increases the costs of the video disks for the system.